Home Button not Working on iPhone or iPad?

Here’s how to get along without it.

Extensive usage or actual damage can cause the home button can become unresponsive.

Using your iPod touch, iPhone or iPad without the Home Button CAN still be done via the touch screen.

You may have to restart you device and login freshly to get basic ‘home/start page’

Here’s how:

1. Open Settings.

2. Go to General > Accessibility

3. Scroll down to the section labeled INTERACTION and tap on AssistiveTouch.

4. On the next screen, toggle AssistiveTouch to the green On position.

5. A white circle with a grey box will appear on screen. Tap this circle to expand it to a big box on screen. The square Home button at the bottom of the box functions exactly like the physical home button – you can use it to single tap, double tap, or long press the home button even if there is a hardware problem. The grey box remains visible and usable in all apps.

This will put a little ‘Circle’ on your screen that when tapped will bring up this menu:

While setting up a few new users I was getting an error while trying to add a new email account. While walking through the default setup – simply launching Outlook on a new users profile (who, of course, has and email account associated with his AD account) Outlook gave an error message that said, "The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action."

Now, I know that I’m online on the domain – the new user authenticated. AND I could ping the Exchange server via name too. Also since there are other users on this device and it’s fairly new I was pretty sure that it’s not a system error.

It finally seemed that the user (PC) was not able to see our domain controller as the global catalog server and hence was not able to find our mail server via Active Directory. [Why this was happening on only this user will have to be further investigated ]

Per MS – This behavior occurs when the Exchange Server computer (where the Outlook client is homed) and the global catalog server are both located in a site that is remote from the Outlook client location. (article here).

The fix:

Click Start, and then click Run.

In the Open box, type regedit.exe, and then click OK.

Locate and then click the following key in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Exchange Provider Note You may have to create the registry path.

On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:

Restart the PC and you should be able to reopen Microsoft Outlook and run through your profile set up. If finding the global catalog server was the issue, the problem should now be resolved and the email account should now properly add properly.

Because I have so very many usernames and passwords, I must use some sort of password database manager. For sometime now I have been using KeePass – an open source password manager. Though it using it ‘can’ be slightly more onerous than a completely ‘online’ password manager like LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane or the like, it provides for WAY more security by enabling you to ‘own’ the database AND a seed file. And being an IT security guy here is no way I’d put my passwords in the cloud.

KeePass is technically an offline password manager, but its database can be synced between computers with a service like Dropbox, Google Drive or the like. Of course, at that point, you’re putting your passwords back in the cloud. BUT if you have created a KeyFile and don’t place that in the cloud and use something that is not obvious. You eliminate the ability for someone to just steal your password database and start brute forcing it.

Okay so now some more bad news. LastPass, probably the most widely used online password keeper, is once again in the news for some VERY serious security flaws.

You might want to rethink your password manager solutions or go back to pen and paper.

There are dozens of scenarios where you would want to access a physical hard drive from inside your Hyper-V virtual machine ranging from accessing and importing data, dumping data from the virtual machine into the external drive, and importing or exporting disc images.

Whatever reason you have for wanting to access an existing local hard drive in your Hyper-V machine it’s, unfortunately, a bit complicated giving the drives access to the virtual machine. Unlike other virtualization solutions (VMware and VirtualBox) there is no easy way to just share resources between the host machine and the Hyper-V virtual machine.

To use a drive within a Hyper-V machine you need to take the drive, while physically attached and mounted to the host machine, offline and then reroute the offline-to-the-host disk into the virtual machine. Let’s take a look at how to do that now.

A quick note before we proceed: this trick only works with hard drives (magnetic hard drives, solid-state hard drives, and removable USB hard drives) but does not work, alas, with removable media like flash drives.

Drive Preparation and Mounting In Hyper-V

There are two primary steps to the procedure. First we need to manage the disk from within Windows on the host machine to bring it offline (but still powered and attached to the host computer) and then we need to tell Hyper-V to take control of the now-offline disk.

Preparing the Drive

The first step is to bring the disk offline. To do so open up the Disk Management application by searching for the application name or typing “diskmgmt.msc” in the search box and running the app. Within Disk Management look for the drive you wish to pass through to the virtual machine.

Although it’s probably safe to assume, since you’re playing around with Hyper-V and concerned with matters like physical-disk-pass-through, that you’re already familiar with Disk Management it would be remiss of us not to issue a standard warning: Disk Management is a powerful tool and you can do terrible things to your system by mucking about within the management system. Double check each step and make sure you’re working with the right disk(s).

In our case we want to pass Disk 10, a USB backup HDD, through to the virtual machine so we can dump some backup files from our virtual machine onto the disk. To prepare the disk we must first locate it in the list of drives within Disk Management, right click on it, and select “Offline” from the right-click context menu as seen in the screenshot above.

Confirm the disk is offline. If you wish to bring the disk back online, after you’re done using it within the virtual machine, simply return to this menu, right click on the disk, and select “Online” to bring the disk back online for the host operating system.

Adding the Drive to the Virtual Machine

Once the disk is offline to the host operating system it’s time to add the disk to the virtual machine within Hyper-V. Launch Hyper-V and, from your Virtual Machines list, select the machine you wish to pass the hard disk through to.

Right click on the machine and select “Settings…”

From within the Settings menu for that specific virtual machine, select “SCSI Controller” from the left hand navigation pane. Select “Hard Drive” and click the “Add” button.

Note: We’ve presumed you wish to pass the hard drive through to the virtualized operating system which means you already have a SCSI controller and virtual disk for the OS. If you do not yet have a SCSI controller you will need to first select “Add Hardware” at the top of the navigation pane and add a “SCSI Controller” to your virtual machine.

Select “Physical hard disk” and then, from the drop down menu, select the disk you brought offline in the previous section of the tutorial. Don’t worry there’s no chance you’ll accidentally select a disk from the host machine that you didn’t intend to use. The only disks you can select in the physical hard disk menu are disks that are powered and attached to the host machine but in an offline state. If you didn’t put it offline it isn’t even an option.

Confirm the disk selected is the disk you want. Press the “Apply” button and then “OK”. Boot up your virtual machine.

Accessing Your Pass-through Hard Disk

In the vast majority of cases the disk should be automatically detected by the host operating system as if it was simply a physical disk attached to the real machine the virtual machine is emulating.

If the disk isn’t immediately accessible to the virtual machine operating system you may need to open up, in the case of Windows, Disk Management and bring the disk online. When using other operating systems you’ll need to perform an equivalent action to access the disk through the virtual OS.

A very important word of caution here. The OS in the virtual machine has no idea that this disk actually belongs to your host machine and it will act upon the disk however you tell it to act upon the disk. If the disk does not automatically mount in your virtual machine OS you need to use a mounting procedure (refer to documentation for the particular OS in question) to mount the disk in the non-destructive way so that it can be returned to the host operating system later on.

When you no longer need the disk in the virtual machine simply boot down the virtual machine. Do not attempt to make changes to the drive state via the host machine until you’ve turned off the virtual machine the drive is connected to.

You can outright remove the hard drive from the virtual SCSI controller in your virtual machine if you aren’t going to use it again or you can leave the entry. Any time the physical drive is disconnected from the host machine or you’ve made it online for the host operating system the drive will simply appear as unavailable to the virtual machine.

Fix Elevated applications not having access to mapped drives

One of the side effects of UAC is the inability to access the mapped (over net use) network drives from the applications running in privileged mode (Run As Administrator). This means that when you run the command prompt or an application (like SpecWin) with elevated privileges, they won’t display the disk letters of the mounted network shares.

A quick way to show what this looks like. Open command prompt, as a regular user, not an administrator and run/enter:

net use

Your screen should look something like this:

And if you change directories and looked at what’s there, it would look something like this

If you run the command prompt ‘As Administrator’ the prompt will look something like this:

If you try and change drives you will get something like this:

This behavior of the system can lead to some inconveniences when trying to run apps elevated often.

Why does it happen? This peculiarity is connected with UAC mechanism for a user with the local administrator privileges. The matter is that when this user signs in, two access tokens are created: the first token provides access without the administrator privileges (the filtered access token, with which most apps are run) and the second is the administrator token with full privileges in the system (all apps approved elevated in UAC are run using it).

When connecting shared network folders, they are associated with the current session for the current process access token and are not available with another token.

There is a solution. To implement it, you have to make some changes to the registry:

Open the registry editor (regedit.exe)

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Create a new parameter (DWORD type) with the name EnableLinkedConnections and the value 1

Restart your computer

After the computer has been restarted, make sure that you have access to the network drives from the apps run with the administrator privileges.

How it works. After you enable EnableLinkedConnections parameter of the registry, LanmanWorkstation and LSA will check if there is the second access token associated to the session of the current user. If this token is found, the list of the mounted network drives will be copied from one token to another. Thus, the network drives mounted elevated will be seen in the standard mode, and vice versa.

In the Enterprise environment Windows Operation Systems are usually created, captured and deployed via MS SCCM, WDS or other imaging deployment technology. This allows for an Operating System to be deployed that is updated to the latest version(s) and standards of the organization along with any other software (Office suites, AV etc.) or configurations required by that organization. These system images can be ‘pushed’ out to machines, ‘pulled’ across the network via network (PXE) boot, or be placed on portable media to be installed by technicians (usually USB drives).

I also personally install a lot of Operating systems for my SMB clients, friends and family. This requires me to have install media that is as up to date (patch wise) as possible so that I do not have to spend hours, or often days, downloading security updates and patches just to install a system and get it safe.

I used to have a full server farm (including SCCM) on my home server/workstation so creating custom images (.wim) was not too much work. However, that machine physically gave up the ghost a while ago. So for personal images I decided to create a custom image on my laptop using Microsoft Hyper-V (available on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10).

Below is how I created my latest Windows 10 fully patched image. After following these steps you will have a UEFI capable ISO and the ability to produce a UEFI bootable flash drive.

So here we go…

You will need a Microsoft Windows 10 (or 8.1) installation ISO. If you don’t have your Windows 10/8.1 installation media available or someone else’s (just iso not license key needed) it is possible to find the .iso files via a good search.

[Note: you will need a valid installation key once you install your image to a machine to activate it. Or use a KMS server/volume license.]

Then let the setup continue until it reboots and you get to the first ‘customization’ screen.

Enter Audit Mode and Install Applications

Start Windows installation normally. After reboot or two Windows is installed and process stops waiting your input. At this point we need to click on the Use express settings button. On next dialog you should not type a username, so don’t enter it. – STOP.

Instead, press and hold down the CTRL+SHIFT+F3 keys combination. Windows will now reboot to a special customization mode, the Audit Mode.

When presented with the System Preparation Tool window, click Cancel

You’re now in Audit mode. Audit mode is used to add customizations to Windows images. When you use audit mode, the system does not have to apply settings in Windows Welcome – things like creating user accounts, read and accept the Microsoft® Software License Terms, and select their language and time zones etc. It is designed specifically for preparing Windows images for deployment.

Okay so now let’s prepare and update the system. In Windows 10 (and 8.1) you can forcefully check for updates here:

OR you can use PowerShell to update – as in my previous article. I’d make sure ALL the updates are done – reboot several times (clicking ‘Cancel’ each time) until you’re sure that there are no more updates.

You may also want to uninstall any Windows ‘Store’ apps per this article.

Here is where you will download/install any software you wish to be on your image.

Once done with all your installs you should clean up all temp files (I use CCleaner portable) and run Disk Cleanup too.

So now let’s finalize and Sysprep the disk.

Shutdown your Staging VM.

Create a Checkpoint

Click Action > Checkpoint.. > Enter "Ready for sysprep" > Click Yes

Power your Staging VM back on.

When logged in, do not close the System Preparation Tool window this time.

Select Enable System Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE)

Checkbox Generalize

Select Shutdown

Click OK

Now we’re going to create the WIM file that we’ll use for creating our install media. The WIM file is a compressed image which is deployed during Windows installation. The install.wim file is the actual source used when installing Windows 10. Thus, we need to create our own WIM file, and replace the stock one with it. To do this, we need to "capture" the last Checkpoint – the one named ‘Complete’.

We’ll use the DISM tool to capture a mounted hard drive.

So we first need to mount the VHD (virtual hard drive) of our very last/updated VM – the checkpoint we named complete.

Once your VM is shut down, create another Checkpoint named "Complete". Do NOT power your VM back on.

As mentioned above, the install.wim file is the actual source used when installing Windows 10. Thus, we need to create our own WIM file, and replace the stock one with it. To do this, we need to "capture" the last Checkpoint.

replacing F: with the second partition drive letter you made note of earlier – and replacing "Customized by: Darth Sidious" with whatever you want.

Depending on your processing power, this may take a little while. When complete, you will see "This operation completed successfully." You should now see a file named "customInstall.wim" at the root of your C:\ Drive.

Build the Customized Media

Open/Double click the stock ISO you used to install Windows in stage01 to mount it within File Explorer.

One of the first cool things about Rufus Portable is that no installation is necessary to run it. When you run it, setting it up is simple. Select the USB drive you want to use. To make sure your drive will boot on most devices including newer UEFI ones select the ‘MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI Computers’ and also ‘Use Rufus MBR’ option.

Then select the disc icon next to the ISO drop-down and navigate to the location of your newly created Windows 10 ISO.

After that click Start and you should be good to go, within minutes.

Hope this helps some. I put this up here, like most of my stuff, mainly so I have a place to remember what I did. 😛

Many of us do our taxes as soon as we get our year end statements and many of us have quarterly taxes we pay.

Either way please keep an eye our for scams ‘reminding you of payments’ telling you owe payments and the like.

Believe me – if the IRS or the State wants their tax dollars they’ll reach out to you via REGULAR MAIL they will NOT be using some third party payment processing company.

The idea with emails like the one I just received is to first scare you into thinking you owe money, and second get you to click on a malicious link – one that will either infect your system or get you to a site designed to one way or another separate you from your money. Often times with life operators asking questions and continuing the scare tactics.

Above is one I just received. – IT’S COMPLETELY B.S.!!

Please IF you are ever concerned about a Tax problem go to the ‘front door’ of the agency – www.irs.gov, www.oregon.gov/dor, or the like, via your web browser address bar (NOT a search bar – the very top bar of your browser that says, http://www……)

So another year is gone and a new one is upon us. Many of us have received or purchased new computer systems for personal use, work or school or will be soon. Nowadays many of us have a great deal of our lives – pictures of family, personal and legal documents and more stored digitally on our computers. And many do not have any backups of said systems.

I continually preach the benefits of using system images for backing up your computers. With imaging you can restore entire systems in case of hard disk failure, restore individual files and folders, upgrade/migrate to newer larger and faster HDDs (usually SSDs) and even move to completely new systems.

One of the first things everyone should know is that your digital system(s) WILL fail. And can at anytime. And if you have no recoverable backup your data will be gone forever. Please don’t let this happen to you. One thing I do – because I am such a stickler on having my own stuff backed up, is have TWO full backups on SEPARATE disk drives. This allows for me to keep the two seperate full images in two different locations. And should one backup drive fail, I have another to go to. The likely hood that both would fail (along with my primary system) is remote and if I had that triple whammy I’d have to assume God needed me to lose it all.

External Hard Disk Drives can be had very inexpensively. For example here is a good deal on one from Amazon. And the cost of imaging software is under $100.00 US (often way less too). A VERY small price to pay for peace of mind and the security of knowing you’ll be able to recover your important files, pictures and entire system.

Of course on Macs, you can use Apples built in Disk Utility to create an image but it is more onerous. And you can’t really make incremental backups. You can of course, create an image and use TimeMachine backups to make up the difference I guess.

As a free alternative for Windows 8.1 and 10 there is the built in backup utility which includes and imaging option. However I’ve had issues restoring images to differing hardware. Here is a very good article on how to do that.

Another very good option for PC is Macrium Reflect. They even have a free version (here) that works very well. I’ve used the latest version successfully a few times.

One more way I use to augment my backups is with the "Cloud". Cloud storage sounds very nebulous, but is really just utilizing large storage pools made available by numerous internet service providers to augment their offerings and services. Cloud storage is GREAT for storing a large amount of ‘nonproprietary’ information; things like most pictures many documents and files etc. I just make sure to not put up to the cloud any critical/personal/financial documents or other highly private information. I pay a little extra to Google to have loads of extra Google drive space that I upload many pics and files to. [and of course Google provides for free unlimited photo storage with some gotchas on the having to do with photo size and quality]. I have Microsoft’s One Drive that came with my purchases of Microsoft Office and some Windows 10 devices; but that storage size has been cut down recently. With my Amazon Prime account I also have unlimited picture storage too. And I also even have Dropbox.

So for plain mundane data storage you can see I use many of the available options in the cloud. But the ‘cloud’ does NOT enable you to recover your entire system should the drive or other major component fail. Or worse – burn up in a fire or get damaged by some other catastrophe. So no matter what I store in the cloud I ALWAYS have copies on my own personal systems somewhere.

I may be a more than a little "tight" about keeping data. But decades of dealing with data losses in the corporate and personal world has made me so.

I hope that some of you take some time in this New Year to do some digital safe guarding. Like a fire extinguisher you need to have it on hand and ready before you have the fire.

This is something that happens very often in large organizations with remotely connected sites (whether via MPLS nodes, connected VPNs or remote VPN users).

If you’ve spent any time in the desktop support arena you’ve likely had this error/issue dozens of times. Here are some surefire ways to fix this fairly quickly.

MANY, many sites will tell you to remove the PC from the domain, delete the computer account and then re-join the computer. This does work – SOMETIMES and can bring on even more problems when it fails.

A simpler solution, that actually works, is to use PowerShell to resolve the issue. You will need to log into the computer as a local administrator (or possibly you can use the cached domain admin credentials if that’s still an option)

Here are the commands to use in order of preference.

Depending on what version of Windows you are on and how up to date it is you should first download the latest Windows Management Framework (WMF). this contains the latest versions of PowerShell, DSC, WMI, and WinRM for downlevel versions of Windows and Windows Server. Here’s that link

Make sure to specifiy you DC and your domain user name, you’ll be prompted for you password. The script will run and you’ll be back to the Powershell prompt. Then just restart machine and try domain login.

An older method you can also try the NETDOM way ( most useful on some non upto date Win7 machines). You’ll likely have to download the Microsoft Remote Server Admin Tools from here. Install and then

use the following from an elevated cmd prompt: netdom.exe resetpwd /s:dc-hostname.domain /ud:domainadminusername /pd:* (enter the domain admin password when prompted)

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